"Gangs of New York"

But not quite as straight and tall as William Cutting, also known as Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), the leader of the rival "Native Americans," longtime New Yorkers of largely Anglo descent who resent the mere presence of the Irish interlopers on their turf, a tough section of lower Manhattan known as the Five Points. It's 1846 and, for reasons that are never quite explained (we're supposed to chalk it up to mere territorial pissing), the two groups go at each other with a vengeance in a bloody brawl. Ears are chewed off; pikes are jabbed into sternums.

Finally, Bill, his pate encased inexplicably in a fitted leather aviator cap (it's like a Goth version of the things you see on the Christ child in old Flemish paintings), finally kills Priest in full view of Priest's young son, who we know will grow up to be stalwart Leonardo DiCaprio. After spending some 16 years in an orphanage, he will reappear on the scene, using the name Amsterdam to disguise his identity. He will wreak vengeance on Bill, but not before the two forge a complicated and doomed father-son relationship.

By 1863, the Dead Rabbits have been long disbanded, and Bill the Butcher rules the Five Points. Much of the rest of New York is a swirling mass of thievery and corruption, both official and otherwise; Boss Tweed (the amusingly hearty Jim Broadbent) steps into the action now and then, and the movie culminates in a major citywide eruption fueled partly by the (fictional) scuffle between the resurrected Dead Rabbits and the nativists and the (real-life) Civil War draft riots of 1863, in which enraged, destitute, frustrated citizens took arms against the authorities.

Scorsese tries to conjoin the fight between the Rabbits and the nativists with the draft riots in a way that doesn't make sense: It's easy to intuit that the draft laws would have greatly affected impoverished Irish immigrants (it was possible to avoid the draft by paying the sum of $300, a prohibitively high price for just about any newcomer). But beyond that, it simply looks as if Scorsese is seeking an excuse to stage an even bigger, nastier brawl than the one he opened the movie with. He and screenwriters Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan (underworld historian Luc Sante also served as a consultant on the picture) set themselves up as folk-tale-telling historians, intent on telling a story that feels true, even if whole patches of it are sheer invention.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course, just as there's nothing wrong with the fact that Bill the Butcher is based on a real character, but one who died in 1855, before the main action of "Gangs" takes place. Filmmakers and storytellers of all stripes take liberties like that all the time. But Scorsese's romanticized vision of gang warfare as a prelude to melting-pot patriotism is harder to buy. People with differences have always fought, and will continue to do so; sometimes the result is a kind of patched-up harmony, and sometimes there's no result at all other than more fighting.

But Scorsese, gleefully moving his toy-soldier Jets and Sharks around on the game board, is too intent on turning a bunch of scrappy thugs into democratic heroes -- albeit unfocused ones. To his credit, he's more interested in well-sharpened characters than ideas. Still, it's hard to know exactly what his ideas are. We connect with the gang leaders' sense of honor and dignity: Bill the Butcher reveres Priest, the man he killed so brutally, simply because he had the guts to put his life down for what he believed in. But where has respect for your enemies really gotten you if all you're after is to be the kid with the most toys and the most power, as Bill has become? Bill the Butcher isn't exactly a man of vision (though he is pretty handy with a meat cleaver, putting it to good use on both humans and pigs). He's a bigot, and Scorsese makes that clear. Yet we're supposed to recognize him as a symbol of good old-fashioned American stick-to-itiveness. Because it doesn't matter what you stand for, as long as you stick to it.

There are more problems: Relationships aren't as fully fleshed out as they should be. You can see the deep daddy-son bond flowering tentatively between Bill and Amsterdam, but it still seems forced rather than felt, an emotional construct that has to happen to move the action forward. And it's not nearly as interesting as the relationship between Bill and Priest -- a grudging respect between feral brothers in the spirit -- which takes up much, much less of the movie.

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